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I have been asked to make a wishlist, and I need advice on Septuagint resources. Here are some resources that seem useful to me. Are any of these no longer worth the effort? Are there better resources that I have missed?

Choice of edition is only really important in vol. 3, where the first edition had significantly less material than its successors.

Regarding the Brooke-McLean-Thackeray Cambridge Septuagint: Vol. 1, Parts 1-4 were published 1909-1917 and are undoubtedly in the public domain. But Vol. 2, Parts 1-4 were originally published 1927-1935 and outside the USA, so according to the usual copyright laws they would still be copyright in the USA, wouldn't they? I think the Internet Archive might possibly have erred by identifying the publication date of the whole work as 1909. But I'm not sure about that.

(The Internet Archive uploader scrupulously noted a bit of cropping in the gutter on pp. 45ff., but it only affects two or three chapter numbers, and that only slightly.)

Personally I would rank that ahead of Ottley's Isaiah as the most important public domain edition of a single LXX book, because it remains the only full scholarly edition of any form of the GII text of Ecclesiasticus. (Other editions print GI where it exists and use GII, if at all, only where GI doesn't.) It's therefore substantially more different from any other text of Ecclesiasticus than Ottley is from any other text of Isaiah.

Evan Blackmore wrote:I think all the listed books are worth processing. All of them have been valuably supplemented by later works, but not one of them has been supplanted.

Yes! That's the right standard to use, thanks for phrasing this so well.

Evan Blackmore wrote:Swete's Septuagint is actually in 3 vols. Trying to choose the best digitized copy of the latest edition of each volume available at the Internet Archive, I'd suggest the following:

Evan Blackmore wrote:Regarding the Brooke-McLean-Thackeray Cambridge Septuagint: Vol. 1, Parts 1-4 were published 1909-1917 and are undoubtedly in the public domain. But Vol. 2, Parts 1-4 were originally published 1927-1935 and outside the USA, so according to the usual copyright laws they would still be copyright in the USA, wouldn't they? I think the Internet Archive might possibly have erred by identifying the publication date of the whole work as 1909. But I'm not sure about that.

The 1923 rule is just one of the rules for copyright, and it can get complex, depending on what was published where, whether copyrights were renewed under certain provisions during certain periods, etc. Best overview of U.S. law is here, download the PDF.

But here is another simple rule: death of the author + 70 years, and that's more widely accepted in other countries. So if all authors died before 1943, it's clean.

Thackery died in 1930, Alan England Brooke in 1939, Norman Mclean seems to have died in 1947. That means Volume II will have to wait until 2017, but we have plenty to do between now and then.

Yes, that does look good. As far as I can see, this scan appears to contain only Vol. 1, and note that it's the first edition (1887) (although I believe vol. 1 underwent only minor corrections in later editions).

Yes, that does look good. As far as I can see, this scan appears to contain only Vol. 1, and note that it's the first edition (1887) (although I believe vol. 1 underwent only minor corrections in later editions).